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MONTREAL — The city of Montreal awarded roadwork contracts that called for repaving some parts of Notre Dame St. E. three times within eight years, a Gazette investigation has found.

Moreover, the examination of contracts for work on Notre Dame E. — as well as those for a stretch of Côte des Neiges Rd. — show that during the mid-2000s the city blatantly communicated the estimated value of each contract it planned to award before going to tender, while shrouding details about some of the work from council and the public.

The frequency of repaving on certain sections of road that were examined raises questions about the necessity and quality of the work that was done.

The job of repaving a street doesn’t change much from one jurisdiction to another, be it Montreal, Quebec City, Ottawa, or even the United States.

Unlike simply patching potholes here and there, repaving involves milling — removing — 40 to 60 millimetres of asphalt across a road surface and pouring a fresh layer of asphalt to the same thickness, with the depth depending on such factors as the volume and type of traffic and the speed limit.

When Quebec City repaves its roads, that work lasts for 15 years, city spokesperson Jacques Perron said.

The city of Ottawa says the life cycle of the pavement on its high-traffic arterial roads is 15 to 20 years after they’re repaved; it’s 35 to 50 years on residential streets.

Yet in Montreal, the surface layer of asphalt on some sections of arterial roads, such as Notre Dame E. and on Côte des Neiges at Decelles Ave., appear to have been removed and repaved inside of one to six years, the investigation found.

It also found that repeat work was done on some underground water mains on Côte des Neiges at Queen Mary Rd., where the city awarded contracts in 2006 and 2009.

The Charbonneau Commission on collusion in government construction contracts has heard testimony from businessmen and former city engineers that collusion among construction companies bidding on road and sewer contracts in Montreal inflated prices on those contracts by about 30 per cent. Commission witnesses have alleged that the Mafia took a 2.5-per-cent cut off contracts while city engineer Gilles Surprenant took one per cent and the chief of financing for former mayor Gérald Tremblay’s Union Montreal party took three per cent.

But if roadwork is done repeatedly without justification inside of the 15 years that the road surface is supposed to last, that 30-per-cent overcharge might in fact be 100 per cent or 200 per cent.

In October, the commission asked Surprenant, who admitted to taking a cut from colluding firms, whether each of a series of construction contracts the city awarded in the mid-2000s was rigged. On most, his answer was yes.

But he wasn’t asked how many times the city had already done the same work, and whether any work was botched.

The city required a standard 50-millimetre thickness for repaving work on Notre Dame E., which sees heavy truck traffic.

By comparison, the contract specifications for roadwork on Côte des Neiges in 2009 called for milling and repaving of 85 millimetres of asphalt.

Transport Quebec, meanwhile, repaves 60 millimetres on its high-traffic highways, such as the Décarie Expressway. The Transport Department also says it uses higher-quality material on Décarie, such as by adding steel slag to the asphalt mix to make the surface more durable.

In a June 2011 report on fighting fraud, collusion and corruption in the roadwork industry, the World Bank recommended that government bodies hire a technical auditor to do spot checks on projects to ensure the materials, quantities and work conform to the specifications.

The technical auditor is like a financial auditor, such as Montreal’s auditor-general. But while a financial auditor reviews financial records, a technical auditor reviews the work done.

And to make sure the financial auditor, elected officials and key civil servants involved in awarding contracts are not corrupt themselves, another measure endorsed by the World Bank is to periodically check their wealth. The report says that more than 100 World Bank client countries require designated civil servants and politicians to periodically submit statements showing their income and assets, such as the value of their homes and the number and type of cars they own. An enforcement agency can compare what they report with real-estate and automobile records and by doing inspections.

At its weekly closed-door meeting on June 30, 2004, Montreal’s executive committee passed a special internal bylaw that gave the city’s top civil servant at the time, city manager Robert Abdallah, the power to award “all contracts within the jurisdiction of the executive committee” for the next month, and to authorize the related expenses.

Abdallah approved $12.3 million in road and sidewalk work and studies while the committee members, including then-mayor Gérald Tremblay and 11 city councillors, were on summer holiday. The Gazette reported on the situation when it discovered the bylaw upon the councillors’ return in late July.

It was an uncommonly large delegation of power by the elected officials on the executive committee to an individual bureaucrat, albeit one that’s sanctioned by the city charter.

The executive committee could have called a special meeting or met by phone to award the contracts, Frank Zampino, then-chairman of the committee, told The Gazette at the time. But the delegation of authority had the same result, he said.

Among the spending decisions, Abdallah authorized a $2.4-million contract to Simard-Beaudry Inc., a firm belonging to businessman Antonio Accurso, who would hire Abdallah four years later as president and CEO of another of his firms, Gastier Inc.

The contract was the first of three phases of roadwork that were planned for the safety redesign of intersections and repaving of an eight-kilometre stretch of Notre Dame E., the most heavily travelled of the city’s arteries.

The $2.4-million contract Abdallah authorized to Simard Beaudry in 2004 called for the repaving, where required, of a stretch from Ste. Catherine St. E. eastward to “a point east of Dickson St.”

The contract also called for the redesign of the intersection at Notre Dame E. and Dickson.

However, city records show the intersection had also been redesigned in 1998, under a $1.78-million contract that included other roadwork in the sector.

A year after Abdallah awarded the Simard Beaudry contract, the city awarded a $5.2-million contract for the second phase of the Notre Dame redo in September 2005. The winner was Simard Beaudry Construction Inc.

The work called for redoing the intersection of Notre Dame E. and Ste. Catherine E. — which was included in the repaving work the previous year — and repaving Notre Dame E. from Ste. Catherine E. westward to Frontenac St.

The repaving was necessary, the civil service report prepared by the city’s engineering division said, because the pavement was “highly degraded.”

The work also called for other intersections to be rebuilt, such as Notre Dame E. at St. Clément and Viau Sts., and repaving of a section of the Notre Dame E. bicycle path.

The third phase of work, which the city awarded in 2006, entailed the redesign of some intersections, work on another section of the bicycle path and repaving of Notre Dame E. from Dickson east to Curatteau St. — even though Notre Dame E. had already been repaved “to a point east of Dickson” in 2004, along with the rebuilding of the Notre Dame E./Dickson intersection.

Construction DJL Inc., which had bid on the two previous contracts, won the $8.17-million contract in 2006.

And it wouldn’t be long before the asphalt trucks would return to Notre Dame E.

In 2012, the city went back to tenders to award a contract to repave four sections of Notre Dame E., three of which had been included in the repaving contracts awarded to Accurso’s firms in 2004 and 2005.

The city awarded the $2-million contract in 2012 to another Accurso firm, Louisbourg SBC s.e.c.

The three sections where work was being repeated included Notre Dame E., from Davidson St. to Bourbonnière Ave., which was repaved in 2005. In fact, the 2005 contract even entailed the redesign of the intersection at Notre Dame E. and Davidson, as well as the repaving of the approaches at Bourbonnière and Notre Dame E.

The 2012 contract also called for repaving Notre Dame E. between Létourneux and Sicard St., which was also done under the 2005 contract.

And the 2012 contract called for repaving Notre Dame E. between St. Clément and Dickson, a stretch that was supposed to be repaved in two parts under the 2004 and 2005 contracts. In fact, the stretch includes the intersections of Notre Dame E./St. Clément/Viau and Notre Dame E./Ste. Catherine E., both of which had been rebuilt in 2005.

The same stretch also includes the intersection of Notre Dame E./Dickson, which had been rebuilt in 1998, rebuilt again in 2004 and repaved under the 2006 contract.

Despite all the work over the previous seven years, the state of that stretch of Notre Dame E. between St. Clément and Dickson was “passable” in 2012, the city says. A civil service report prepared by the city’s engineers to recommend awarding the 2012 contract called the new contract preventive work to preserve the life of the road.

The city said it was looking into The Gazette’s findings on the Notre Dame E. and Côte des Neiges contracts, but wasn’t yet able to explain the apparent overlap despite having more than a week to examine them. The work involves a lot of research going back several years, and different divisions were involved in different contracts, city spokesperson Philippe Sabourin said.

The Charbonneau Commission has heard testimony that the city of Montreal telegraphed its budget for different roadwork contracts to bidders during the mid-2000s.

Lino Zambito, vice-president of Constructions Infrabec Inc., which bid on contracts in Montreal, testified in October that bidders could extrapolate the city’s budget for a contract because the bid bond (to guarantee completion of the work) that the city required with each bid in the mid-2000s was expressed as a dollar value instead of a percentage. A bid bond is generally 10 per cent, he said. So it wasn’t difficult for bidders to calculate that a $200,000 bid bond, for example, meant the city’s budget for the contract was $2 million.

However, The Gazette examination discovered the bidders didn’t need calculators to figure out the city’s budget for some of the roadwork contracts for Notre Dame E. and Côte des Neiges.

The city explicitly stated the value of the contracts in civil service reports and resolutions prepared by city engineers, which were made public before the city went to tenders. Bodies from the World Bank to the U.S. Department of Justice say that communicating the budget or estimate of a contract before it goes to tender aids collusion.

For example, when the executive committee passed a resolution in April 2004 to authorize the launch of a call for tenders to award the first phase of work on Notre Dame E., the resolution said the redesign of Notre Dame E./Dickson would cost $2 million.

Abdallah approved a contract to Simard Beaudry for $2.4 million, 20 per cent above what the city budgeted.

The circumstances explaining the difference aren’t public. The civil service file, including the contract specifications, is not accessible to the public, the city says, because such internal delegations of power to civil servants are confidential.

The bids on the first phase of the Notre Dame E. road work were opened on May 27, 2004, a month after the executive committee authorized the call for tenders.

The bid list shows Simard Beaudry was the lowest of five bidders with its $2.4-million offer.

It’s not clear why the executive committee didn’t award the contract before going on a month’s holiday on June 30.

It’s also unclear who changed the specifications after the executive committee passed the resolution to go to tenders to award a $2-million contract to redo the Notre Dame E./Dickson intersection.

The contract Abadallah authorized on July 14, 2004, called for: milling and repaving of the stretch of Notre Dame E. from Ste. Catherine E. to “a point east of Dickson,” rebuilding sidewalks, curbs, medians, traffic islands and traffic separators, as well as redesigning the Notre Dame E./Dickson intersection.

Abdallah would not grant an interview to The Gazette because he doesn’t have the file or any information to answer questions about the contract, said Gilles Dauphin, a spokesperson for Abdallah. He added that any changes to the specifications would have had to have gone to the executive committee for approval.

The city’s archives department told The Gazette it could find no other executive committee file on the matter.

Meanwhile, the contract tender specifications for the 2012 contract — put together two years after the administration of then-mayor Gérald Tremblay said it had tightened contract tendering process in the wake of allegations of corruption and collusion — also raises a question about how the city restricts competition.

The specifications on the 2012 contract required bidders to use one of two commercial asphalt products, one of which is produced by a division of Construction DJL, “or an approved equivalent” to the pave Notre Dame E.

By comparison, Transport Quebec doesn’t specify suppliers or company products that have to be used on its highway roadwork projects, said Michel Paradis, an engineer who tests and researches asphalt for the Transport Department. Transport Quebec lists generic requirements for the asphalt mix it wants in its contract tender specifications, he said.

“It’s a question of competition,” Paradis said.

“That’s why we think you have to be as generic as possible. You need competition. You need to allow everyone to bid on a department contract.”

François Voisine, a representative of Construction DJL, said the company did not have to respond to a call for tenders to have its asphalt product selected as one of two required by the city in the 2012 contract. DJL does a lot of product testing and development and the products have a good reputation, he added. The one chosen by the city has good resistance to cracking, he said.

Still, the tendering documents for different roadwork projects that The Gazette examined show the city has a pre-approved product list for everything — from pipes to tree grates to street lamps to, of course, asphalt — including the approved supplier of the products. The list was last updated in March 2005.

The city awarded the three phases of repaving and intersection redesign on Notre Dame E. between 2004 and 2006 before Tremblay announced his administration’s 20-year transit plan in 2007, which calls for a long-discussed project to “modernize” Notre Dame E. into an “urban boulevard.”

The $1.5-billion reconstruction, to be footed by the province, remains at a standstill.

The 2012 repaving contract was intended to prolong the road surface on Notre Dame E. until the reconstruction project begins someday, the city’s Sabourin said.

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